Off the keyboard of George Mobus
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Published on Question Everything on March 20, 2015
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Happy Vernal Equinox
At my age, every spring I get to witness is a happy event!
Would that I could say as much for the state of our world. The evidence for the accelerating advance of global warming and the consequences of climate change is mounting....

From the keyboard of James Howard Kunstler
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Originally Published onClusterfuck Nation March 30, 2015
It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new ...

From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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First published at The Daily Impact March 24, 2015
You see the stories here and there, usually in local West Coast papers and on specialized websites. One has a gross picture of a dissolving starfish, another a heart-tugger of a starving sea lion pup. Then there are the stories that have no pictures because they are about something that isn’t there, ...

Off the keyboard of td0s
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Published on Pray for Calamity on November 14, 2013
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There are a lot of blogs out there that focus on “collapse,” and many of them will from time to time post statistics about increased crime rates in order to demonstrate the slow deterioration of society, occasionally showing videos of flash mob...

Off the keyboard of Richard Douthwaite
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Re-Published on FEASTA on March 22, 2015
From the Thermodynamic View of Money article by RE
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by admin
Richard Douthwaite
Money has no value unless it can be exchanged for goods and services but these cannot be supplied without the use of some form of energy. Conseq...

Off the microphone of RE
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Aired on the Doomstead Diner on March 28, 2015
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Snippet:
…As the monetary system shows ever more signs of instability every day, there are still plenty of “China Bulls” out there, although these days they seem to be more of the Geopolitical persuasion than the Economic one. Today’s China Bulls are...

Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Resource Crisis on March 23, 2015
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Climate Change: how to make the problem bigger. Lessons from the case of world hunger
Results of a search for “world hunger” using Google Ngram Viewer. Clearly, the perception of hunger as a major world problem is relatively recen...

Off the keyboard of Jonny Mnemonic
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Published on April 23, 2013 on Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis
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With this post, the Diner welcomes Jonny Mnemonic to the pantheon of cross posting Bloggers on the Diner.Jonny runs the Blog Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis, where he collects daily evidence of seemingly ine...

Off the microphone of RE
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Aired on the Doomstead Diner on March 28, 2015

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Snippet:
…As the monetary system shows ever more signs of instability every day, there are still plenty of “China Bulls” out there, although these days they seem to be more of the Geopolitical persuasion than the Economic one. Today’s China Bulls are folks like Pepe Escobar, Dmitry Orlov and The Saker, and they talk about/promote the idea there will be a great new Eurasian Empire formed up by integration of the Chinese and Ruskie economies along a “New Silk Road and mega projects like a High Speed Rail line between Beijing and Moscow will be built.

These folks appear to be a bit behind the curve though, because while they are talking about mega investments in another form of technological futures, the OLD BEARS like Jim Rogers are RUNNING FOR THE HILLS! Capital can’t fly fast enough out from the hills of emerging economies, and this isn’t just the Ruskies and Chinese, but the Brazilians, Indians, Pakistanis, South Koreans…etc, NONE of these places are too popular anymore for getting lots of Funny Money support. How […] Continue Reading…

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Aired on the Doomstead Diner on March 25, 2015

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OUT WITH THE OLD…

Snippet:
…As we observe the ever upward spiral of crisis around the world and the utter madness of the responses begin to overwhelm you, you begin to wonder why no White Knight in Shining Armor ever turns up? Where are the Great Statesmen of Yore who saved the world in prior calamitous times? Why aren’t such great men & women apparent anywhere these days, but rather just further iterations of puppets like Shillary Clinton and Jeb Bushsky?

Depending on who is writing and what the political spin is, you have any number of people who are pointed to as an example of a Great Statesman. The Founding Fathers of the FSoA often get the nod, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Sam Adam and the rest of the folks who dropped their John Hancocks on the Declaration of Independence. Later on in the FSoA, “Honest” Abe Lincoln and “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson are seen by some as great statesmen.

Over in Eurotrashland, the winning side History books often portray folks like Winston Churchill, […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Surly1
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Photograph by Mark Wilson — Getty Images

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on March 22, 2015
“…In theory, “Net Neutrality” sounds great. As I understand it, the idea here is that everybody, from Individual Doomers like me to big Content Distributors like Netflix are all on the same playing field, all with equal opportunity for bandwidth… to distribute your content on the net. While certainly there are a lot of issues as far as Political Spin is concerned and Da Goobermint would like to Muzzle annoying websites like the Diner, the real underlying battle here is as usual, all about the MONEY.”
–Reverse Engineer, March 4, 2015

As it is ever, and always. Several weeks ago my friend and colleague RE composed a Rant on net neutrality, from which the above quote is taken. Several weeks later, the dust has begun to settle, and we have a better idea of what the FCC ruling means. Lawsuits plus the beginning of the Telecom Lawyers Full Employment Act of 2015.

Who doesn’t like the idea of a unfettered internet? The FCC finally got assertive in protecting the open web, which we agitators feel flush with victory. The idea that the Internet should be […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of RE
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Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 22, 2015

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As veteran Diners know, a while back a few of us got together to develop our ideas around building Sustainable Communities in the face of Collapse. After a few false starts and a few mistakes, last year we chartered a Non-Profit 501c3 Corporation, the Sustaining Universal Needs Foundation, or SUN for short. It is based in South Carolina, one of the most economically deprived states in the FSoA, in the Bottom Quintile*.

The logistics of getting these sort of things off the ground are immensely difficult, first from getting all the paperwork correct, but then even after that getting everyone to work together to make it a going concern is difficult too. Then there are all the details, like getting the bank account set up, getting the PayPal account setup, getting it all hooked together, yadda yadda. If you are currently working, it is kind of hard to find the time to devote yourself to all of this nonsense.

Conveniently or serendipitously however, I just Retired from paid work, and have more time to spend […] Continue Reading…

Posted originally on TBP on 21st February 2011 by Reverse Engineer in Economy

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40 Years of Economic History in the FSofA

Back in the 1970s our beloved POTUS Tricky Dick “I am not a Crook” Nixon took a trip over to China, “opening” the closed doors of the then “Communist” nation to the wondrous world of Capitalism. Just around the same time, the same Tricky Dick slammed shut the Gold Window on Charlie DeGaulle’s fingers, Women were out on the streets Burning their Bras and at about the same time as all of that we hit local Peak Oil here in the FSofA and became a net Oil Importer. Interesting Coinkidinks, no? Of course, it is no coincidence, all of these factors are integrally related. This Rant will explain all these relationships, and how Unions and the Capitalist model functioned from the period between 1970 and 2011. It will also explain why the spin down occurring now was inevitable regardless of the economic behaviors of the participants, although the spin down might have occurred differently had other paths been pursued. Pretty big undertaking to complete inside of 3600 Words, no? […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of George Mobus
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Published on Question Everything on March 20, 2015

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Happy Vernal Equinox
At my age, every spring I get to witness is a happy event!

Would that I could say as much for the state of our world. The evidence for the accelerating advance of global warming and the consequences of climate change is mounting. In spite of the drastic cold that much of the Midwest and East experienced in the US this winter, the continent has had one of the warmest winters on record. We have certainly enjoyed the milder climate where I live. Not so much for those in the Southwest where drought is still a major problem.

The only good news (until you think about the causes!) is that CO2 emission levels were stable this last year — they didn’t grow. But one of the reasons they didn’t is that the amount of carbon being burned has not grown. And that is because, in spite of all the clap-trap statistics out of Washington and other capitals, the global economy has not grown. The amount of real economic work (i.e. building things) has […] Continue Reading…

From the keyboard of James Howard Kunstler
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Image: Anthony Freda

Originally Published on Clusterfuck Nation March 30, 2015

It’s not what most people think: a return to some hypothetical “normality,” with the ghost of Ronnie Reagan beaming down like a sun-god under his lopsided pompadour, and all the happy self-driving GM cars toodling back and forth from WalMart-to-home loaded to the scuppers with new electric pop-tart warmers and 3-D underwear printers. (Or drone deliveries of same from Amazon.com.)

I mean, surely the thinking folk out there must be asking themselves: what is the way out of this Federal Reserve three-card-monte, one-percenter-stuffing, so-called “economy,” and what is the destination of this society when that mendacious model for living fails?

I digress for a moment: there was a chap named Richard Duncan on the pod-waves this weekend (FSN Network) putting out the charming idea that quantitative easing (QE — governments “printing” money to buy their own bonds) had the effect of “cancelling debt” and that it could continue for decades to come. I don’t doubt that there are Federal Reserve officers who believe this. The part they leave out — and Mr. Duncan also left it out until pressed — […] Continue Reading…

From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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The fish held a meeting, and decided to spread the alarm, but it was too late. They were all dead. (Photo James Palinsad/Flickr)

First published at The Daily Impact March 24, 2015
You see the stories here and there, usually in local West Coast papers and on specialized websites. One has a gross picture of a dissolving starfish, another a heart-tugger of a starving sea lion pup. Then there are the stories that have no pictures because they are about something that isn’t there, such as sardines and krill. Or something that is happening but cannot be watched, like the slow impassive death of oyster beds. It takes a while for it to begin to dawn on you: Holy Crap! Everything on our Pacific Ocean coast seems to be dying!

In yet another tribute to the limitations of expertise and the need for generalists, you seldom find a review of everything that is assaulting the creatures of the western sea. So let us try to step into the vacuum, which we abhor.

Starfish. Millions of sea stars have died along the West Coast from Alaska to Mexico in the past two years, afflicted by a […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of td0s
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Published on Pray for Calamity on November 14, 2013

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There are a lot of blogs out there that focus on “collapse,” and many of them will from time to time post statistics about increased crime rates in order to demonstrate the slow deterioration of society, occasionally showing videos of flash mobs such as this one below.
Video Removed by You Tube

There was a time when I would have seen something like this and thought, “Whoa, things are getting bad.” My evolution has been long, and now I find myself seeing something like this and thinking, “Good for them!” Previously, I was subject to knee jerk reactions which were preprogrammed responses that were silently imprinted in me by our culture. Now that I have slowly stripped away layer after layer of cultural programming and dogmatic response, I can examine any given scenario based on it’s specific criteria, and come to an analysis that I find satisfying. I’m open to critique of my analysis, as challenging my biases and interpretations hones my senses and my ability to comprehend my surroundings.

Off the keyboard of John Ward
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Published on The Slog on Mar 27-28, 2015

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A320 LUBITZ CRASH EXCLUSIVE: The A320’s history of unexplained descents into terrain.
By John Ward March 27, 2015 A320 history of uncontrolled descent Andreas Lubitz Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) Lubitz probably gay

The tabloidisation of the A320 Lubitz crash should at least be questioned more closely. Either through media incompetence or other motives, Andreas Lubitz is being misrepresented…and so is the Airbus family history.

This is not The Slog suddenly going wacky: it seems to me very likely that Andreas Lubitz flew his plane into a mountain by locking the pilot out of the cockpit. From the outset, this tragedy looked odd, but these days I have learned to let the dust settle before asking pertinent questions. Perhaps now is the time, however, to question just how open and shut the case is:

1. The A320 itself is billed as ‘an exceptionally safe aeroplane’. But the family of A319/320 does in fact have 60 crashes behind it. And some of them bear similarities:

Off the keyboard of Richard Douthwaite
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Re-Published on FEASTA on March 22, 2015
From the Thermodynamic View of Money article by RE
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Posted on August 4, 2011 by admin
Richard Douthwaite

Money has no value unless it can be exchanged for goods and services but these cannot be supplied without the use of some form of energy. Consequently, if less energy is available in future, the existing stock of money can either lose its value gradually through inflation or, if inflation is resisted, be drastically reduced by the collapse of the banking system that created it. Many over-indebted countries face this choice at present — they cannot preserve both their banking systems and their currency’s value. To prevent this conflict in future, money needs to be issued in new, non-debt ways.

The crux of our present economic problems is that the relationship between energy and money has broken down. In the past, supplies of money and energy were closely linked. For example, I believe that a gold currency was essentially an energy currency because the amount of gold produced in a year was determined by the cost of […] Continue Reading…

The most vapid slogan since Cameron made ‘Change’ his slogan in 2010
“Everything – no matter how unlikely – will happen in the end,” said Marshall McLuhan nearly half a century ago. Today, the Labour Party fulfilled his prophecy; and in doing so, its leaders showed themselves to be as bereft of culture, sensitivity, creativity and sagesse as their allegedly sworn enemies, the Conservative Party.

There are two film-makers in the US I admire more than most – and it’s typical of me (the impossible to pigeon-hole nuisance) that they are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The first – Clint Eastwood – made a movie seven years ago called The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie. It was I think Jolie’s finest hour to date: a magnificent piece of acting about the instincts surrounding being a mother. And it was also typical […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Resource Crisis on March 23, 2015

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Climate Change: how to make the problem bigger. Lessons from the case of world hunger

Results of a search for “world hunger” using Google Ngram Viewer. Clearly, the perception of hunger as a major world problem is relatively recent: it peaked in the 1980s and it remains well entrenched in collective consciousness today. Would climate change show the same trajectory in the future? And, if it does, does it mean that the problem can be solved? Or won’t we only make problems bigger in the efforts of solving them?
Momentum is clearly building up for climate action, even though denial is still putting up a stiff resistance. So, in a way, things are going well, but is it enough? Do we still have time for significant action against climate change? And if we will engage in such an action, will we take the right decisions?

Normally, the key of the future lies in the past and we can examine our present situation with climate in light of an older problem: world hunger, which went through a […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Jonny Mnemonic
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Published on April 23, 2013 on Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis

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With this post, the Diner welcomes Jonny Mnemonic to the pantheon of cross posting Bloggers on the Diner.Jonny runs the Blog Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis, where he collects daily evidence of seemingly inexplicable phenomena of spontaneous Bus combustion, people suffocating in their homes, plane crashes and so forth.The hypothesis here is that the atmosphere is already becoming filled with pockets of Methane and Hydrogen Sulfide gas being released from ocean plumes, and these are responsible for the seemingly inexplicable deaths and explosions. Jonny has collected thousands of stories over the last few years to validate his hypothesis on his website. Visit there for the full listings.-RE

This is a substantial revision to ‘The Jumping Jack Flash Hypothesis’, written on April 23, 2013. Nothing about the conclusions or predictions has changed, but I have reformatted the information, breaking the information down into three sections for (I hope) improved clarity and understanding: What Is Happening, Why Is This Happening, and What Are The Effects.

Off the keyboard of Anthony Cartalucci
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Published on Land Destroyer on March 26, 2015

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US-Saudi Blitz in Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation

March 27, 2015 (Tony Cartalucci – NEO) – The “proxy war” model the US has been employing throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even in parts of Asia appears to have failed yet again, this time in the Persian Gulf state of Yemen.

Overcoming the US-Saudi backed regime in Yemen, and a coalition of sectarian extremists including Al Qaeda and its rebrand, the “Islamic State,” pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militias have turned the tide against American “soft power” and has necessitated a more direct military intervention. While US military forces themselves are not involved allegedly, Saudi warplanes and a possible ground force are.

Though Saudi Arabia claims “10 countries” have joined its coalition to intervene in Yemen, like the US invasion and occupation of Iraq hid behind a “coalition,” it is overwhelmingly a Saudi operation with “coalition partners” added in a vain attempt to generate diplomatic legitimacy.

The New York Times, even in the title of its report, “Saudi Arabia Begins Air Assault in Yemen,” seems not to notice […] Continue Reading…

Why fiscally, financially and economically, America is an accident waiting to happen.
The American ‘recovery’ that seems always to be round the corner just disappeared around another corner as 2015 Q1 draws to and end. Estimates for GDP growth have been halved (from 0.6% to 0.3%) and investment in new business premises cut by a third…from -13.3% to -19.6%. Or put another way, growth is stalling again, and 50% more ‘not expanding’ has occurred than initially thought.

So yet again, we see a ‘result’ – the soaring value of the $US – that bears no relationship at all to a very sick US economy. And still jobless numbers come in to suggest that the unemployment rate is down again at 5.5%. That doesn’t compute either….especially with the country still edging down towards deflation. The Fed’s view now is, on balance, that unemployment will stop falling “pretty soon”. […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
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Angelus Novus, “The Angel of History,” Paul Klee, 1920
Originally published in Asia Times on March 21, 2015
“…it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger (to the U.S.) emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”
-Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997

What’s in a name, rather an ideogram? Everything. A single Chinese character – jie (for “between”) – graphically illustrates the key foreign policy initiative of the new Chinese dream.

In the upper part of the four-stroke character – which, symbolically, should be read as the roof of a house – the stroke on the left means the Silk Road Economic Belt, and the stroke on the right means the 21st century Maritime Silk Road. In the lower part, the stroke on the left means the China-Pakistan corridor, via Xinjiang province, and the stroke on the right, the China-Myanmar-Bangladesh-India corridor via Yunnan province.

Chinese culture feasts on myriad formulas, mottoes – and symbols. If many a Chinese scholar worries about how the Middle Kingdom’s new intimation of soft power may be lost in translation, the character jie – pregnant with connectivity – is already the starting point to make 1.3 billion Chinese, plus […] Continue Reading…

Off the Keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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The Glad News Bears are cute and entertaining, but should not be mistaken for financial advisers or life coaches. (Frederick Stuart Church)

First published at The Daily Impact March 20, 2015

This week, the U.S. Energy Information Agency forecast that oil production in the country’s two largest fracking patches — Bakken in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in Texas — will actually decline this month. To those who have been watching the agony of the oil patch with clear eyes, this had all the shock value of a soaked weather forecaster, standing in a downpour, predicting rain. But it had no effect at all on the Glad News Bears, the relentless chanters of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and “Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More.”

By Glad News Bears I mean the people who have been successfully spun by the propaganda juggernaut run by the Masters of the Fracking Universe and their financial-engineer accomplices. It is they who invented and sold the idea of a renaissance of the American oil bidness that would lead to energy independence and total world domination (cue the insane laughter). They sold it to the riverboat […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
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Originally published in Asia Times on March 20, 2015
Way beyond an Iran nuclear deal, and way beyond the end of a nasty economic siege that’s been in place for 35 years since the Islamic Revolution, the coming Western embrace means above all that Iran is now ready to crash the chessboard I call Pipelineistan.

By the mid-2000s, one of the top mantras of energy analysts in Iran and across Asia was what was known as the Asian Energy Security Grid. Translation: a pan-Asian integration via energy flows of the region’s oil and gas. Pipelineistan connected these relevant dots in the Eurasian chessboard.

Washington was always set on stopping Pipelineistan in its tracks. Case in point: the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski brainchild that was built for almost $6 billion as an explicit geopolitical weapon to bypass Iran’s energy exports.

Another example is frantic efforts by both the Bush junior and Obama administrations to derail the former Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as “peace pipeline”, which may eventually be built and named IP – for Iran-Pakistan.

Now it’s a completely different story. Even U.S. Big Oil is salivating at the prospect of doing […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Resource Crisis on March 20, 2015

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Frontiers does it again: how bad practices in science publishing can mislead the public
The publishers of “Frontiers” provide readers with a remarkable pitch for their activities that includes the lavish use of terms such as “grassroots”, “community oriented” “empowering researchers,” and the like. Unfortunately, reality is far from these fantasies. “Frontiers” is not a grassroots initiative, but a profit oriented, commercial publishing house, and scientists have no control on what they decide to publish or not to publish.

I described in a previous post how the science publisher “Frontiers” took down a perfectly legitimate paper in climate science on the basis of unscientific criticism they received – a story that led me to resign from the position of chief scientific editor I had with them. Now, they did it again, although in reverse: they refused to take down an unscientific paper about AIDS on the basis of perfectly legitimate scientific criticism they received about it. What they did was, instead, to demote it to an “opinion” paper. That only made the problem […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of John Ward
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Published on The Slog on March 20, 2015

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TSIPRAS/MERKEL SUMMIT: You thought Greek politics complicated? Wait until you tot up the seismic splits in the EU
Take a close look at the timeline since Thursday night’s mini-summit marathon between Alexis Tsipras and Angela Merkel.

After a 3am Friday finish, German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the meeting as “good and constructive,” but warned that the Greek government will have to meet commitments before it can access EU money. She gave Syriza exactly seven days to offer fully detailed “reform” proposals to Troika2, and then left clutching several haunches of Venison and 683 sausages for her beloved fridge.

A few hours later, however, Jean-Claude Juncker – the President of the European Commission (EC) – announced a completely unconditional 2 billion euro contribution immediately available to Greece to boost growth, tackle youth unemployment and help with the “humanitarian crisis”. Juncker said the cash for this would come from “unused EU development funds”.

When I called the EC press office this afternoon and asked how this circle might be squared, there was much scurrying about and promises of getting back […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Geoffrey Chia
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Composed in February 2014. Published on the Doomstead Diner March 21, 2015

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This essay is not for religious fanatics or new age ideologues who refuse to accept, against overwhelming evidence, the fact that homo “sapiens” are a species of ape, with more than 98.5% of our DNA being identical to that of chimpanzees. For truly sapient readers who are willing and able to accept the reality of our present insoluble2 predicament, here it is in a nutshell:

Human beings are biological organisms subject to the laws of Nature. We share the same DNA coding as all other living creatures. We cannot survive without the ecosystems we were evolved to live in, the same ecosystems we are now destroying at an exponential rate. There is no evidence humans were supernaturally created by some magical being(s) who gave us a divine “right” to consume, exploit and poison everything around us indiscriminately. That is simply a delusional, if conveniently self justifying, fairytale.
By means of random mutation and natural selection we, one particular species of ape, evolved a cleverness exceeding that of other animals. This freed […] Continue Reading…

From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Stop the presses! We have 47 names to add.

First published at The Daily Impact March 12, 2015

When 47 United States Senators sent a letter to the government of Iran, presuming to explain our Constitution (which, the Iranian Foreign Minister immediately observed, they do not seem to understand) and demonstrating profound ignorance of international law, they did not merely embarrass themselves and our country, they broke the law. Their purpose was to prevent the Obama administration from reaching an agreement with Iran to prevent that country from manufacturing nuclear weapons (something the country has always professed it does not want to do anyway).

These Senators presumed to tell the leaders of Iran that should they reach agreement with the United States negotiators, who for years have been trying to find a way to limit Iran’s nuclear energy program to prevent weaponization, any such agreement would probably not be honored by the Congress or the next administration. Since no such agreement exists yet, they made this threat without knowing what would be in it. Doesn’t matter; if Obama did it, it’s evil.

Off the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
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Reuters / Ali Jarekji
Originally published in RT on March 17, 2015
US Secretary of State John Kerry may be starting to enjoy the brinkmanship, as he says it’s “unclear” whether the US and Iran would reach a political framework nuclear deal before the end of this month.

Loud applause may be heard in corridors ranging from Tel Aviv to Riyadh.

As negotiations resume in Lausanne, the fact is a potential nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, BRICS members Russia and China, and Germany) is bound to open the possibility of more Iranian oil exports – thus leading oil prices to fall even further. As of early this week, Brent crude was trading at $54.26 a barrel.

Assuming the US and the EU nations that are part of P5+1 really agree to implement the suspension of UN sanctions by the summer (Russia and China already agree), not only will Iran be exporting more energy – that should take a few months – but also OPEC as a whole will be increasing its oversupply.

Off the Keyboard of RE
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Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 22, 2013

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On Wednesdayday, March 18, 2015 at precisely 4:04 PM ET in the FOREX trading Markets, there was a Flash Crash of the Dollar. Just prior to that though, the Almighty Dollar was subjected to an event known in Mathematics and Physics as a “Singularity”
sin·gu·lar·i·ty

ˌsiNGɡyəˈlerədē/

Physics Mathematics

A point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space-time when matter is infinitely dense, as at the center of a black hole.

You see clear evidence of The Singularity in the compression of values that occurred directly before just about every FOREX trading pair went BERZERK, and the Dollar value relative to all of them Flash Crashed.

You see a similar effect in a Black Hole, when matter is compressed to infinite density and infinitessimal space, collapsing on itself from too much Gravity pulling it inward and lack of Energy pushing it outward.

The formation of Black Hole comes at was is known as an “Event Horizon”. That is the point in Space-Time at which the equation “flips over” and irreversible collapse occurs, leading […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Michael Snyder
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Published on The Economic Collapse on March 18, 2015

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10 Charts Which Show We Are Much Worse Off Than Just Before The Last Economic Crisis
If you believe that ignorance is bliss, you might not want to read this article. I am going to dispel the notion that there has been any sort of “economic recovery”, and I am going to show that we are much worse off than we were just prior to the last economic crisis. If you go back to 2007, people were feeling really good about things. Houses were being flipped like crazy, the stock market was booming and unemployment was relatively low. But then the financial crisis of 2008 struck, and for a while it felt like the world was coming to an end. Of course it didn’t come to an end – it was just the first wave of our problems. The waves that come next are going to be the ones that really wipe us out. Unfortunately, because we have experienced a few years of relative stability, many Americans have become convinced that Barack Obama, […] Continue Reading…

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